At an early age I learned to sharpen a knife very well, even before I was in the BOY Scouts.
When I started hunting I would use my mother’s paring knife to dress out rabbits and squirrels.
I would sharpen the knife so I could cut the meat well and when I was done, I would wash it off and put it away. After the second time that my mom split her thumb, needing stitches, my dad decided that I needed my own knife for dressing game. So he got me a Western Cutlery antler handle with a three inch blade. That was a very handy little knife for the task.
All was well, until I washed the knife and laid it on the back of the kitchen sink at which time my mom just cleaned up a bunch of vegetables and turned on the garbage disposal.
That knife vibrated off the back of the sink, landed handle first in the garbage disposal with the razor sharp blade spinning like a Samurai warrior and my mom grabbed quick to get it out.
Now my dad was very impressed with the fact that she reached in the disposal while running. She managed to shut it off and get my knife out, and there was very little damage to the bolster.
My dad took her to emergency and I don’t have any idea how many stitches she had but they were all over her fingers. Two here three in that spot, one here, well you get the idea.
So now for the list of victims.
In the Boy Scouts I gained a reputation for being the official blade sharpener for the adult leaders. On this one campout, I had sharpened a machete for one of the leaders and a bayonet for another one.
While we were clearing some brush the leader with the machete swatted a mosquito on his lower right leg and then a minute later had a tickling on his leg. He had cut clear to the bone and had to be taken to the hospital.
A few hours later he was just getting back to camp and the other leader needed a piece of rope so he used his bayonet to cut some off from a tent rope. As he was bent over, he cut the rope and the blade cut across the top of his foot, cutting threw his moccasin and the tendons of the top of his foot.
So as the years go by, I start making knives. My mom and dad stopped buy my house and I show my dad a small two inch fixed blade that I had just made. He looks at it and my mom wants to see it. As she is looking at it she drops it, stabbing half of the blade in her ankle just between the bone and the Achilles tendon. At which point my dad looked at me and said “I’m not surprised.”
So the next victim. I’m working at a tool shop and one of the engineers comes up to me and said he heard I could sharpen a knife well. And he wanted me to sharpen a folding hunter for him, and I asked him how sharp he wanted it and he said as sharp as I could get it.
Now it was the day before Gun season and he was going to the airport right after work to fly to the UP of Michigan.
In the late afternoon he came to me and wondered if it was done yet. And I opened the knife and shaved some hair off my arm. He grabbed the knife and tried to do the same thing. He cut a one inch patch of hide about five inches long, flopped over like a wood chip from a wood plane and my knees went weak. I told him that he didn’t have to push that hard.
So after he got out of the emergency room he got on the plane.
Another time a production foreman asked me to sharpen his knife and the next day he told me he had stitches in the palm of his hand. He was at a car dealer waiting for some paperwork and he decided to see if he could get the battery out of his remote lock. He took the knife and was prying the remote apart when he slipped and stabbed his other hand.
Another time I was sharpening a knife for my boss when another manager came in and saw what I was doing and asked me to sharpen his knife. So I did. I handed it back to him and he held it cutting edge up and slid his thumb the full length of the blade.
Like my boss said “You can’t fix stupid.”
Well I guess I should tell on myself.
This one time I was fly fishing and I had a small little pocket knife and I had just tied on a new fly. I was standing on a small raft with waves rocking it. I took the small one inch thin blade, cut the tag end of the fishing line and closed the blade up on my hip. Only the blade didn’t close up. I pushed the full length of that little blade right into my hip bone and it wasn’t easy to pull back out.
So who would like me to sharpen there knife for them?
